Hotel Sidheshwari Ashram

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"Hotel Siddheswari Ashram is one of the city’s few surviving pice hotels. Inside the unassuming dining hall, men in bright orange shirts scurry among the marble-top tables with quiet urgency, taking orders, pouring water into earthen pots, or swiftly plunking wedges of lime and blobs of salt onto plates lined with banana leaves. In pice hotel tradition, the menu is handwritten on a blackboard; the spread, and the prices, depend largely on what’s best at the bazaar that day. You can usually take your pick from dishes like shukto (a bitter stew of assorted vegetables), lentils cooked with fried fish head, a robust mutton curry that everyone praises, or a light stew of fish and vegetables called kabiraji jhol, a typical sick-day meal in Bengali homes." - Priyadarshini Chatterjee